Yesterday in Riyadh, a missile fired by Yemen’s Houthis struck King Khalid International Airport, killed 13 people, and wounded hundreds more. Attacks in the previous week had killed four others. Because Saudi Arabia has been trying for years to shed its reputation for austerity and discomfort, a sterile, boring airport with overpriced pastries and harsh lighting is a national accomplishment.

A 62-grain, 5.56-mm round leaves the barrel of a standard-issue M4 rifle at approximately 2,900 feet per second. When it strikes a human being, the results are violent, traumatic, and unpredictable. If Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has his way, such images will soon be broadcast to the American people. The Pentagon has announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Army officer convicted of killing 13 fellow service members in a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas, will be livestreamed.

Even if you don’t know much country music, you likely know how much the genre loves the trope of the weepy father at his daughter’s wedding. In the best sketch of last night’s Saturday Night Live, the father of the bride was played by the host, Shane Gillis, but he wasn’t reflecting on life’s heavy milestones. Instead, he was thinking about “all the cool shit I can put in her room.

and then I lose an hour to those billiard-trick-shot videos,
magnificent, their impossible spins, flawless timing,
the punctuated clunk of the corner pockets like God exhaling
just a little. I lose another hour watching and another.
Months evaporate this way. There’s the one where the cue ball
kisses every single solid in procession as if in a receiving line
before sinking the eight.

Because literary journals tend to have small circulations, few readers are likely to have come across “The Whistleblower,” a short story by the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza. Published in 2021 in a journal called Transition, the story is a taut and closely observed political thriller in miniature.